Senior Manager, Creative Operations, VMSD & Packaging

Company Description

WHO WE ARE

fresh is a global company headquartered in New York offering a full lifestyle line spanning skincare, lip care, bodycare, and fragrance in over a dozen countries. But we don’t just aspire to make the best products on the market; we want to be the best beauty brand to work for. We’ve created a warm, inspiring environment with world-class benefits that encourages our teams to dream big, because that’s how we got here.

Here at fresh, we intentionally foster a spirit of belonging. We celebrate our diversity and support every employee to feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard. By embracing curiosity and collaboration, we recognize that our differences strengthen us.

MAIN JOB OBJECTIVE

The Senior Manager, Creative Operations for Packaging and VMSD owns the operational systems, workflows, and cross-functional processes that power global packaging design and visual merchandising initiatives. This role governs project intake, prioritization, resource planning, and timelines to ensure creative concepts are executed efficiently from brief through production and market rollout.

Acting as the operational bridge between Creative and cross-functional partners including Marketing, Packaging Development, Purchasing, vendors, and global markets, this role ensures alignment, feasibility, and budget adherence across all initiatives. The Senior Manager leads vendor and production coordination, artwork and VM toolkit lifecycle management, and proactively identifies risks to protect delivery.

A key focus of the role is continuous improvement — standardizing processes, optimizing tools, and establishing reporting and feedback loops that enhance efficiency and scalability across Packaging and VMSD teams.

Job Description

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own and continuously improve the operational systems, workflows, and tools that power the Global VMSD and Packaging Design teams in Workfront
• Manage project intake, prioritization, and assignment across both teams, ensuring alignment to business priorities and team capacity
• Lead end-to-end project lifecycle from brief through artwork release protecting timelines, scope, and budgets
• Assess team capacity and balance workload across VMSD and Packaging to ensure realistic planning and resource utilization
• Identify project risks early, escalate appropriately, and implement mitigation plans to protect delivery
• Lead cross-functional project communication and creative review cadences to ensure alignment from concept through execution.
• Serve as the operational bridge between Creative and cross-functional partners and global markets
• Track and manage the annual budgets including estimates, invoices and purchase orders for Global & North America VMSD and packaging design

VMSD Project Management

• Oversee Global Visual Merchandising campaign order process in partnership with Purchasing serving as key point of contact for fabricators, material suppliers, artisans and POSM vendors
• Develop a calendar and deliverables for each vendor and ensure adherence to those deliverables and schedules.
• Drive the feasibility, prototyping and value engineering process related to the industrialization of new launches, merchandising units, graphics, glorifiers, window kits, and evergreen toolkits, considering the local market requirements and conditions
• Liaise on seasonal and core visual merchandising guidelines to the markets and cross functional teams
• Partner with cross-functional global teams for channel and market specific graphics and copy
• Assist Global VMSD Team on special projects related to Hospitality/Global Theaters and new store design, managing timeline and deliverables
• Ensure scope for each merchandising project is captured during project initiation and fully communicated to cross-functional teams; including budget, design variants, on-counter dates

Packaging Design Project Management

• Build and manage all packaging artwork project plans, routing, approvals, and milestone tracking within Workfront
• Manage creative workflows and communication with cross-functional partners including packaging development, project management, innovation, marketing & purchasing
• Validate timeline feasibility for artwork submissions and deadlines in partnership with project management team
• Manage vendor relationships, budget and timelines for artwork comps, proofs, and match prints
• Ensure all artwork related deliverables are received and routed for final artwork release including final copy, translations, die lines

What you will learn in the first 6 months:

• Build working relationships with key cross